Magnetism is usually taught as a story of straight lines, with field arrows marching neatly from north to south. In a lab at ...

By forcing crystal structures to compete, scientists uncovered a new way to make magnetism twist. Florida State University ...

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have demonstrated a technique for mapping deformation in metals that can recover destroyed serial numbers on metal objects such ...

The discovery of a crystal whose atoms are packed in a pattern that never repeats has won Israeli scientist Daniel Shechtman the 2011 Nobel Prize in chemistry. The structures in quasicrystals, as they ...

Because liquid crystals are similar to oil, the surfactants were attracted to the liquid crystal shells, causing the molecules to order in different ways and create striking patterns. The more soap ...

Remember the graph paper you used at school, the kind that’s covered with tiny squares? It’s the perfect illustration of what mathematicians call a “periodic tiling of space”, with shapes covering an ...